Thirteen children, a theatre director, an author, a scenographer, and a costume designer welcome you to a house that is the final result of a long-term collaboration between Inne Goris and Imelda Primary School Molenbeek. What is the place of art in daily school life?

To close the season, the occasional collective Lucinda Ra is organizing an open studio for three days. You are free to come in and out, join the conversations, or just to listen and watch the music, animated films, short presentations, and visual work. The kitchen – which forms the heart of the project – will be open throughout and is free. You can contribute your own ingredients: a ticket for Grondwerk costs 250 grams of food.

In My Dinner with André Damiaan De Schrijver and Peter Van den Eede sit down for a four-course meal. While one is a sober-minded humanist, the other holds forth about his extraordinary spiritual experiences. The result is a hilarious conversation about their conflicting personal philosophies, about life, and especially about the theatre. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of this cult production!

Joining the American-British invasion of Iraq in 2003 was Japan’s first military engagement since WWII. Historic peace marches took place in Tokyo, and many of the protesters were young people. In Five Days in March, a number of characters voice their deeply personal concerns. The image they sketch of their personal, everyday lives in Tokyo stands in sharp contrast to their public participation in the demonstrations. In this adaptation of his original 2007 creation, Toshiki Okada sketches a generation of young people who have lost their way.

El Conde de Torrefiel is one of the recent revelations at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. The duo creates visual performances in which hyper-realistic tableaux are juxtaposed with incisive texts – a mix of history, current affairs, and futurism. LA PLAZA treats the stage as a square: a public space in which banal, everyday activities in today’s Europe occur, but where disquieting scenes of the future also play out.

Just like Fellini made Roma – an ode to his city – Jan Fabre is celebrating his own complex, crazy country. He is doing so in the most appropriate language to capture the spirit of this slippery state: the language of the theatre and of images. With an international cast of performers and musicians, he goes in search of Belgian identity. Raymond van het Groenewoud has written a series of anthems, while author Johan de Boose wrote the text.

Trials of Money turns the theatre into a court of justice which does not yet exist. You’re invited to take part in the Special Tribunal for Semi-Human Persons in order to undertake the trial of the thing called ‘money’. The trial is conducted as a collective exercise: while the performers deliver their testimonies, they will respond to any question the audience has. Should money be found guilty, it leaves us with a very problematic question: what could be a just sentence?

Just before he died, Stefan Hertmans’ grandfather gave him several full notebooks. The author read about an impoverished youth in Ghent, horrific experiences as a soldier at the front during WWI, and a great love who died young. Years of fascination for his grandfather’s life eventually led Hertmans to write War and Turpentine. Jan Lauwers is now presenting a theatre adaptation of the gripping epic.

In a stimulating theatrical game, you as the audience explore the limits of the imaginable, beyond what is true, good, or politically correct. Can the most cheerful, strange, improbable, and wild fantasies influence the world that we share together? The stakes in the game? To make time and space for our own imagination.

Gallop. Biography of a Body tells the bizarre story of the life cycle of a body. Dolores Bouckaert’s co-star in this solo is – via film and audio – a fast and powerful horse. The two are one another’s opposites until they become interchangeable, when the horse’s gallop coincides with the rhythm of her heartbeat.

Like an engineer at a control panel, Benjamin Verdonck conjures a visual elegy on the stage. From a sequence of miniature landscapes to an endless series of panels that appear and disappear, open and close. Accompanied by two musicians, Verdonck gradually gets lost in his own images.

Do playwrights – like sculptors and painters – have studios where they turn their ideas into material? Matthias de Koning, Damiaan De Schrijver and Peter Van den Eede construct the fourth wall, and subsequently demolish it again. Welcome to this laboratory of naturalism, realism and hyperrealism!

What is happiness? In what dark and remote corners do we have to crawl individually and collectively to find it? Together with dancers from the EnKnapGroup, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper have created a bizarre, painful and hilarious horror comedy about voracious expansion in the Wild West and all the violence that ensued as a result.

What does Palestine mean to the extensive Palestinian diaspora of refugees and self-imposed exiles? Along with five actors, Bashar Murkus suggests a form that connects all these stories in a new kind of Palestinian identity: one that is not tied to a particular territory.

Tibaldus is presenting Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy by the Polish avant-garde author Witold Gombrowicz. The performance area is a circle on the stage. As a viewer, you enter this arena in which a veritable battle unfolds. In the hands of these young performers, Gombrowicz’s absurd universe gets a fresh and playful update!

The Police calls him a Domestic Extremist. The National Health Service has labelled him ‘highly disturbed’ and borderline. He prefers the term Mental. After spending 14 years as an outlaw and in-patient, artist and activist the vacuum cleaner shares an autobiographical performance told through his psychiatric records and police files.

As soon as you walk into House, you will discover things that usually remain hidden behind façades. Wearing headphones, you can explore the space at your own pace. Inne Goris has created a deeply personal installation/production for both adults and children about the dark corners of life. And about how everyone tries to deal with them in their own way.

Prague Castle, 5 AM. The master of ceremonies appointed by Václav Havel finds an EU commissioner asleep under the conference table. Things clearly got out of hand, but what if this is the morning when things turn out for the best? Pieter De Buysser presents a play about magnanimity and magic, about human failings and the glorious dawn of politics.

Johan-Heldenbergh-as-Marx reflects on an eventful life and body of work. What were his mistakes? And where has he been proved right? Can his philosophy still be relevant and liberating? In times of uncertainty and growing inequality, MARX aims to be a challenging, critical, and impassioned defence of freedom and human dignity.

In their characteristic style, the ladies of Discordia break open the plot of Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel The Lady of the Camellias. They seek the assistance – perhaps surprisingly – of the Marquis de Sade. Is there space for Marguerite to have a more active role, or do shame and conventional thinking still stand in the way?

Seeking a better future for his grandchild, Mister Linh flees from a war-torn country. Koen De Sutter tells the story with all the means he has at his disposal: text, words, images, music, sound, projections... But this is also a play about loneliness, about the desire to communicate with the other and not least with the audience. Are we inside the narrator’s head? Are Mister Linh and Mister Bark voices in his own head?

De KOE has unfinished business with the in-between. They perform a selection of arrival and departure scenes from Russian and Western literature, and supplement them with their own texts. Eight actors perform 35 characters who enter and leave in a symbiosis of welcoming and parting ceremonies. Because nobody stays.

What starts as a lecture about Benjamin Verdonck’s new book even i must understand it enjoyably derails into a production that introduces you to one or more table stages. He presents a playful guide to the winding road from his studio to the stage, using stories, photos, films, a little theatre in a box, a cat, and music.